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The unlucky adventurer

In the works of Bohumil Konečný, style and subversiveness

By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
November 19th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Octobriana was Konečný's most famous creation in a career that included advertisements, pinup girls and illustrations for Wild West and boys' adventure stories.
Zdeněk Burian (1905–81) is considered the greatest of Czech illustrators for adventure stories. Just a few years younger, Bohumil Konečný is a close second in terms of his style, prolific activity and varied work. But Konečný has been unjustly ignored, and ultimately forgotten by Czechs due to an unfortunate turn of events at the peak of his career.
Consequently, Konečný’s work is best known abroad, particularly among fellow illustrators in Western Europe and the United Kingdom. He has a wide range of fans: David Bowie is an admirer, and Billy Idol has a tattoo of Konečný’s mysterious Amazonian woman, Octobriana — an invincible super vixen with a communist star on her head.
Konečný’s unlucky story is told through an exhibit of his original illustrations, drawings and paintings currently on display at Obecní dům. Spanning his grade-school days to his death in 1990, the exhibit is an effort to make amends for a true injustice to this exceptional artist, who was underappreciated during much of his lifetime — a victim more than anything else of the communist regime.
Born in Plzeň, west Bohemia, in 1918, Konečný was given the nickname “Bimba” by his father. He was turning out noteworthy caricatures of teachers and fellow students by the time he moved to Prague to study at Czech Technical University in 1936.  
He soon began working for Melantrich Publishing House and the magazines Hvězda and Ahoj. During the years of Nazi occupation, he continued to do illustrations for boy’s adventure stories. From this period, there are cowboys, Arabs and motorcycle racers done in fine two-tones.
In 1942, his first collaboration as illustrator for the popular adventure story writer Jaroslav Foglar was published. Foglar’s most famous characters are “Rychlé Šípy” (Fast Arrows), a group of tough but always fair and decent boys in Prague. Konečný’s illustrations bring to life the gang and their often dark, tension-filled situations.
Under the German protectorate, Konečný mainly did advertising work for Baťa, but was also able to maintain the side projects closest to his heart: caricatures and voluptuous female figures for a German humorist magazine, Lustige Blätter. Using the pseudonym Wiko, he portrayed women flirting naughtily and dangerously with young men, as well as older, overweight bosses and bureaucrats.
In the same style and similar verve for the period, he also has a series of nudes (or scantily clad) young women engaged in various activities like sunbathing or dressing. These call to mind the famous Vargas girls of Playboy magazine, though Konečný’s precious pinup girls shine much brighter, since they aren’t caricatures.
Betrayed by a friend
After the communists came to power in 1948, the fun in Konečný’s work fizzled out. Like other official artists of the period, he was forced to create stolid Socialist Realism posters promoting the Czechoslovak Communist Party and its goals. Through the 1950s, he also did numerous posters for Czech companies such as Tesla (electronics),  Barum (tires) and Pilsner Urquel (beer), most of which seem to promote attractive, seductive Czech women as much as the product itself.
In the liberalization era of Prague Spring, the revival of Czech culture from the First Republic brought with it a renewed interest by younger generations in the adventure series “Rychlé Šípy,” along with Konečný’s unmatched illustrations. In a second wave of illustrations for Foglar’s stories, done in 1969, Konečný shows an intensity and artistic flourish that was not noticeable in the earlier period.
Then, disaster came from an unexpected quarter.
In 1965, Konečný had made an acquaintance with an admirer of his work, Petr Sadecký. Sadecký encouraged Konečný to create a heroine named Amazona, and to make scenes for books by Karl May, the German adventure writer.
In 1967, Sadecký emigrated to the West, though he kept in touch with Konečný, sending him letters and postcards. What Konečný didn’t know was that Sadecký was busy trying to pass himself off as the author of Konečný’s works, first for Karel May Publishers in Germany, then more ambitiously as the discoverer of a group of disaffected Soviet dissidents who, he claimed, had created a heroine named Octobriana, a voluptuous woman with superhuman powers.
In 1971, in London, Sadecký published and promoted a false samizdat book, Octobriana and the Russian Underground, which briefly became a media sensation. David Bowie was so inspired by Octobriana that he wrote songs about her intended for a film. In reality, however, Octobriana was the Amazona character originally drawn by Konečný, simply altered by the imposter Petr Sadecký.
Back at home, Octobriana caused a scandal, as the communists believed Konečný was a collaborator with Sadecký. And so he lost favor with the regime. Ironically, just at the moment he finally had an opportunity to become recognized abroad, Konečný lost his opportunities for work, and the earlier works of his career were suppressed.
Still, during his last 20 years, Konečný made art as he pleased, even if his countrymen no longer had any interest in his work. The last group of paintings and drawings in the exhibit show Wild West bronco-riding cowboys and scheming Indians, and his most provocative and stylized works of nudes and semi-nudes.
Throughout Konečný’s works, there are common traits that ultimately triumphed over communist ideology. In his action scenes, his characters are best shown at the edge of escape. In his Western scenes, whether portraying wild horses or cowboys and Indians, the freedom of the American West is implicit. And his stylized female figures, starting from the 1930s and culminating in the sex-bomb heroine Octobriana, are simply irrepressible.
The show includes a fine color drawing from 1986, of a lovely lady stretching out her arms in joy. Behind her is an Indian chief and an American cowboy riding in a rodeo. One of the girl’s fingers drops onto a man’s severed head on a plate. The title of this work is telling: “My fate — or what I loved to draw and what the communists forbid…”

Tony Ozuna can be reached at tempo@praguepost.com


Other articles in Tempo (19/11/2008):

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